A random girl fixing her baseball cap. Doesn’t look as much like the original idea as I would have liked. Granted, she’s not from anything and I have no plans to use her in any stories, but still, it drives me up the wall when the sketch doesn’t match the idea. Well, unless the sketch turns out better than the idea, of course! 😉

At last! Some screenshots to show you about what the final products will look like.

As you may notice, Ian has a motocycle-like contraption that he uses to travel about the Procyon flatlands in search of scrap. You may remember that I showed the working sketch for this yesterday. Personally, I kind of like the sketch better. :/

The animation is not coming about as quickly as I had really hoped, but progress is being made. I’m doing my best to make sure that, even with the limited time and budget I have to work with, the animation still looks decent and is fun to watch.

The story is divided into “chapters”, and I hope to release the first part of Chapter 1 by the end of this Summer. Each “part” of a chapter is reffered to (at least for now) as a “transmission” and each transmission will have about two to three minutes of video. I’m looking forward to having something to show, so keep an eye on the blog for more previews and announcements. Next time, I might just show off a short animated clip! :3

Awakening from cold sleep some time after the disaster that struck the Procyon Expedition, these two have found themselves stranded eleven and a half light years away from the Solar System with little hope of resuce.

The story begins with Ian, an engineer. He has survived alone on the surface of the planet for nearly a year, searching out scrap and building things in order to keep himself sane. Although he has come across countless life pods containing other members of the expedition, they had all failed during the disaster, leaving their occupants dead.

But this all changes one day when he comes across a life pod housing a young boy named Jordan. Although Ian doesn’t particularly care for the company of children, he decides to look after Jordan, if for no other reason than the company of another human being.

Are they the only ones who survived the disaster? And just how did everything go so wrong in the first place? Both of these questions demand an answer…

Alas, I got very little done today! I set aside the whole morning to mow the lawn (one of the perks of being my own boss: getting yard work done on “company” time ;)), but the sky took to raining–hard–all day. My schedule disrupted, I figured I could still get some light work on Procyon hammered out, but didn’t even manage that. Ended up wasting the afternoon thinking about what needed to get done and never getting around to it. After that, I thought “Oh well, I’ll just call it a day and catch up on some writing this evening.” Instead, wasted the whole evening playing video games. XD …Now I have a headache. -_-

But enough about that.

Sideburns are fun to draw! :3 Looks sort of like Ebenezer Scrooge, though.

Another sketch of Iccari, who was prominently featured in last week’s Sketchbook Monday. Here he looks more sane! He looks funny, though, because he’s holding his shoulders up, but you can’t really tell with that scarf or hood or whatever he’s wearing–so it looks sort of like he has no neck!

For those who haven’t heard yet, Procyon is our upcoming animated project. The first part of the series is still on track for release this summer.

This is a background from the very beginning of the story, our first glimpse from ground level of Procyon 5, the fifth planet rotating Procyon A, primary star of the Procyon system. It’s not nearly as detailed or “painterly” as I originally hoped for, but I still think it looks pretty good, especially compared to most internet animation.

As you might notice, we’re doing the series in 16×9 widescreen, because widescreen is awesome, but more importantly because that’s really what everything is moving to now days. The actual video is being done in 720p HD (1280×720) at 30fps. For low-budget animation like Procyon, the increased resolution doesn’t add as much as it would to, say, Disney or Dreamwork’s stuff, but the video is still going to be much crisper for those who download the high resolution version.

I hope to have some actual screen grabs here soon so that you can see what the characters look like against the background. (If you follow my weekly Sketchbook Monday feature, you should already know what the characters look like.)